Combining Evidence in Cognate Identification

摘要

Cognates are words of the same origin that belong to distinct languages. The problem of automatic identification of cognates arises in language reconstruction and bitext-related tasks. The evidence of cognation may come from various information sources, such as phonetic similarity, semantic similarity, and recurrent sound correspondences. I discuss ways of denning the measures of the various types of similarity and propose a method of combining then into an integrated cognate identification program. The new method requires no manual parameter tuning and performs well when tested on the Indoeuropean and Algo-nquian lexical data.